PARIS 1919 (79 page)

Even then, with some support from outside, they might have had a hope. Of all the powers, Britain was best placed to provide immediate aid. At the end of 1918, British forces from Mesopotamia had moved into the Caucasus on the Caspian side to occupy Baku and its oilfields. Three further divisions had been sent out from Constantinople across the Black Sea to take charge of its eastern end with the important port of Batum, in Georgia. By the start of 1919, British forces controlled the railway that ran across the Caucasus and linked the two cities. British intentions, though, even to the British themselves, were not clear. Access to Caspian Sea oil, protecting a possible route to India, keeping the French out, furthering self-determination: all were reasons for Britain to occupy the Caucasus. By 1919, the Bolshevik menace had been thrown into the mix; Curzon warned about putting the region “at the mercy of a horde of savages who know no restraint and are resolved to destroy all law.” But many of his colleagues were for staying out. What did it matter, Balfour asked, if the Caucasus were misgoverned? “That is the other alternative,” said Curzon sarcastically. “Let them cut each other's throats.” Balfour replied, “I am all in favour of that.”
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Despite Curzon's insistence, by the spring of 1919 the British government was finding its involvement in the area too onerous. “The sooner we get out of the Caucasus the better,” Henry Wilson told Lloyd George. In June the cabinet decided to withdraw all troops by the end of the year. Denikin was to be given weapons in return for a promise not to touch the independent republics. The Italians were meant to be taking over but, as Wilson advised Lloyd George, that was highly unlikely.

The decision troubled many. Hankey, secretary to the cabinet, wrote to Lloyd George that autumn about “the strong feeling which exists in many circles in the British Empire in favour of the Armenians and the natural repugnance to leave to their fate a nation whose cause we have so often espoused in the past. It cannot be denied that there is a certain callousness in withdrawing our forces from Transcaucasia at the very moment when massacres are reported to be in progress.”
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(In parts of Azerbaijan and in Armenia itself, local Muslims were burning Armenian villages and killing the inhabitants.)

The British troop withdrawal nevertheless continued, and, lest Denikin be upset, Britain held off on granting the Caucasian republics recognition. Only in January 1920, when it was clear that the White Russians were finished and that the Bolsheviks were poised to sweep southward, did Britain finally recognize the little states and send them some weapons. The War Office took the opportunity to offload surplus Canadian Ross rifles, famous for their ability to jam even under perfect conditions.
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Meanwhile, a threat was emerging to the south as Atatürk and his forces strengthened their hold on Anatolia. The Turks had never concealed their determination to keep their Armenian provinces and to take back part of independent Armenia. Tentative communications between the Bolsheviks and the Turkish nationalists had already started. Atatürk was no communist but the Bolsheviks, after all, were the enemies of his enemy Britain. Only the independent republics—Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan—kept the Turks and the Bolsheviks from linking up to form a common front against the imperialists, who were trying to dismember both their countries.
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The Bolsheviks, as friendless as Atatürk, responded with enthusiasm, shipping arms and gold down to Anatolia.

While the Allies discussed Armenia in San Remo, the Bolsheviks took its neighboring republic of Azerbaijan. Communist-inspired rebellions broke out in Armenia itself. The Allies contacted the League of Nations to ask it to protect the larger Armenian state they were thinking of setting up; the League, which was then in its early months, replied that since the League itself was not really in existence it could not do so. The Allies then addressed themselves to the United States, where the issue of an American mandate for Armenia had been moribund since Wilson's return from Europe. The invalid president took the request to Congress, which turned it down by a decisive majority in May. Senator Lodge told a friend: “Do not think I do not feel badly about Armenia. I do, but I think there is a limit to what they have a right to put off on us.”
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Kurdistan had even less chance than Armenia of finding a protector. The issue had come up only once at the Paris Peace Conference. When Lloyd George had first produced his list of possible mandates for the Ottoman territories on January 30, he had forgotten to mention it. When he hastily added Kurdistan to his list, he cheerfully admitted that his geography had been faulty. He had thought that it would be covered by Mesopotamia or Armenia, but his advisers had told him he was wrong. Wisely, he did not try to specify the borders of the new mandate: like so much else about Kurdistan, they were rather hazy.
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The Kurds were far away, on the eastern side of the Ottoman empire, and, at that date, had made little impact on world opinion. Mark Sykes, who had traveled in Kurdish territory before the war, liked them because they were tough and good fighters. The American expert, who had never been there, did not: “In some respects the Kurds remind one of the North American Indians. . . . Their temper is passionate, resentful, revengeful, intriguing and treacherous. They make good soldiers, but poor leaders. They are avaricious, utterly selfish, shameless beggars, and have a great propensity to steal.”
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The Kurds lived in a dangerous neighborhood. Beyond the mountains to the north and east lay Russia and Persia, to the west the Turks and to the south the Arabs of Mesopotamia. During the Great War, Ottoman and Russian armies had battled on their northern edge and the British had pushed up from the south. Perhaps as many as 800,000 Kurds had died fighting in the Ottoman armies or of starvation and disease.
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Estimating Kurdish numbers was always difficult. Since Kurdish culture blurred into Arab, Persian, Turkish, even Armenian, it was impossible to say how many Kurds there really were. About three quarters of them—perhaps a million or even two million—lived in the Ottoman empire, the majority in what later became Turkey, the rest in Iraq, with a scattering in Syria. The remainder were in Persia.

It was difficult to say what the Kurds really were. Their name itself originally meant “nomad.” They had little coherent history, merely conflicting myths about their origin. There had been no great Kurdish kingdoms and few Kurdish heroes except Saladin. Kurds were divided by tribes, by religion (most were Sunni Muslims, but there were Shias and Christians as well), by language and by the fact that they were scattered among different nations. They had a reputation for being unruly. A German ethnographer was forgiving: “At bottom their vices are chiefly those of the restless life they lead in a land in which organized government has been unknown for the past eight centuries.” They fought each other, outside authority, whether Ottoman or Persian, and other peoples. The Ottomans had used Kurdish Muslims in their slaughter of Armenians. At the end of the war, the British and Indian troops who occupied the area managed to keep an uneasy peace.
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Unlike other emerging nations, Kurdistan had no powerful patrons in Paris, and the Kurds were not yet able to speak effectively for themselves. Busy with their habitual cattle raids, abductions, clan wars and brigandage, with the enthusiastic slaughter of Armenians or simply with survival, they had not so far demonstrated much interest even in greater autonomy within the Ottoman empire, where the majority lived. Before the Great War, the nationalisms stirring among the other peoples of the Middle East had produced only faint echoes among the Kurds. Even the main center of Kurdish nationalism, consisting of a few small societies and a handful of intellectuals, was in Constantinople. The only Kurdish spokesman in Paris in 1919, a rather charming man, had lived there so long that he was nicknamed Beau Sharif. He did his best, drawing up claims for a vast country that would stretch from Armenia (if it came into existence) down to the Mediterranean. Much of that territory was also being claimed by the Armenians and by Persia.
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Britain was the only one of the powers with more than a passing interest in seeing a Kurdistan on the map. The United States, sympathetic to the Armenians, had no love for the Kurds. The French had put in a claim for a mandate mainly as a bargaining tool; when Britain confirmed its possession of Syria in the autumn of 1919, France dropped any pretense of interest. It continued, however, to oppose a British mandate over Kurdistan.
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Lloyd George and his advisers were primarily concerned with getting and protecting their mandate of Mesopotamia, with its promise of important oil deposits; they would have preferred not to have a slice of Ottoman territory running across the north. A Kurdistan would have the advantage of protecting the southern boundary of Armenia, if it survived, and so providing yet another barrier between Bolshevism and British interests. It would also neatly block the French in Syria and southern Anatolia from extending their influence north. The British assumed Kurdistan could be run cheaply, under local chiefs, on the pattern of the northern frontiers of India. They argued that the Kurds themselves wanted British protection; the Kurds disobligingly spent much energy in 1919 rebelling against British occupation forces and murdering British agents.
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Throughout 1919 and 1920, as they tried to settle the Turkish treaty, the British funded various Kurdish groups that claimed to be able to bring the Kurds under British protection. A Major Noel, the “Kurdish Lawrence,” went on a mysterious mission to the Kurdish areas in the summer of 1919 to stir up an independence movement. He only infuriated the nationalist Turks and his own colleagues. As the British political adviser in Constantinople complained, “I made it as clear as words five times repeated can make things clear that we were
not
out for intrigues against the Turks, and that I could promise
nothing whatsoever
as regards the future of Kurdistan.”
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British support was at best lukewarm in 1919 and was tied, at least partly, to the United States taking on a mandate for Armenia. By the autumn it was clear that was not going to happen. It was also clear that the Turks were far from finished. Atatürk was rapidly building his forces in the east, close to the Kurdish areas. The idea of Britain's propping up a separate Kurdistan became increasingly unattractive from both financial and military points of view. By the summer of 1919, British forces in the Ottoman empire were down to only 320,000 men. In Mesopotamia British authorities argued for incorporating part of the Kurdish territory in the new mandate of Iraq. The Ottoman provincial boundaries had never been really firm in that part of the world, so it could be argued that the old province of Mosul stretched north into the Kurdish hills and mountains.
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The Kurds themselves were divided as ever. Should they put their trust in the Turks or the British? Try to make amends with the Armenians? Ask the Bolsheviks for help? The Greek threat helped many to make up their minds, at least temporarily. When Greek forces first landed at Smyrna in the spring of 1919 and then struck inland toward Atatürk and his forces in the summer of 1920, the Muslim Kurds, generally deeply religious, saw it as a conflict between Islam and Christianity. Atatürk, whatever his private feelings, was adroit enough to use the appeal to Islam when he approached the Kurdish chiefs for their support. Rumors that Britain was planning to seize the southern Kurdish territories drove even Kurdish nationalists to throw their lot in with Atatürk.
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By this point, Curzon and Lloyd George were in agreement for once: an independent Kurdish state was out of the question, even if it meant leaving some Kurdish territories under Turkish control. At San Remo in April 1920, Lloyd George admitted that

he himself had tried to find out what the feelings of the Kurds were. After inquiries in Constantinople, Bagdad and elsewhere, he found it impossible to discover any representative Kurd. No Kurd appeared to represent anything more than his own particular clan. . . . On the other hand, it would seem that the Kurds felt they could not maintain their existence without the backing of a great Power. . . . But if neither France nor Great Britain undertook the task—and he hoped neither would—they appeared to think it might be better to leave them under the protection of the Turks. The country had grown accustomed to Turkish rule, and it was difficult to separate it from Turkey unless some alternative protector could be discovered.

In the peace terms drawn up for Turkey, the status of Kurdistan was left up in the air: perhaps autonomy within Turkey, a mandate under a power or complete independence. Also undecided were Kurdistan's borders, to be settled by a fact-finding mission. (The British made sure that the territories they wanted were firmly placed in the new state of Iraq.) There was a faint promise: perhaps, if the Kurds could convince the League they were ready for independence, and really wanted it, they might one day join with their fellows in Iraq.
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When details of these and other terms filtered out in the spring of 1920 after the San Remo Conference, the reaction among the Turks was entirely predictable. “They were received on all sides,” reported Curzon's emissary to Atatürk, “with derisive shouts of laughter, and the activity of the military preparations was immediately much increased.” In Ankara, the nationalist parliament rejected both the terms and the sultan's government. A steady stream of nationalists slipped away from Constantinople and made their way inland to Atatürk's forces. The Allied high commissioners sent strong warnings that Turkish opinion, already inflamed, would not accept the loss of Smyrna, where the Greeks were digging in. Curzon had feared this. As he wrote to Lloyd George, “I am the last man to wish to do a good turn to the Turks . . . but I do want to get peace in Asia Minor, and with the Greeks in Smyrna, and Greek divisions carrying out Venizelos's orders and marching about Asia Minor I know this to be impossible.”
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